From Paper to Film. Films reviewed: My Name is Andrea, The Zen Diary
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Toronto’s Spring Film Festival season continues with the Jewish Film festival closing this weekend and the Japanese Film Festival just starting up. And ICFF, the Italian Contemporary Film Festival starting in two weeks.
This week, I’m looking at two new movies playing at the two TJFFs, both based on writings and their writers. There is a radical feminist on violence against women, and a zen Buddhist on sustainable vegetarianism.
My Name is Andrea
Wri/Dir: Pratibha Parmar
Based on the writings of Andrea Dworkin
Andrea Dworkin was a poet, a writer and a radical feminist theorist who wrote about the outrage of violence against women, abuse, harassment and rape. Born in the 1940s in Camden, NJ, she grew up in a happy, middle-class family in suburban Cherry Hill. She was assaulted as a teenager, and later, as a college student protesting against the War in Vietnam, she was arrested and sent to the notorious Women’s House of Detention in New York. There she and other political prisoners were subject to horrible abuses by the doctors there. (Her testimony against the prison led to its eventual closing.) She travelled to Europe where she was exposed to the writings of Franz Fanon, Kate Millet and others, which, together with her own experiences, helped develop her radical feminist theory that the patriarchal system of power was based on violence against. And as a poet
and writer, she expanded her critique to include the arts by deconstructing the male gaze within literature
She was also an activist, participating in movements like Take Back the Streets, the aftermath of the École Polytechnique massacre and later, along with Catherine McKinnon, in the movement of Women Against Pornography. She died in 2005.
My Name is Andrea is an unusual biographical documentary, that looks at Dworkin’s life, her writings and her philosophy. It includes early home movies, TV footage and personal letters and notes. What’s unusual is there’s no outside narrator or recent talking heads; instead it relies on recordings of her own voice (and those of other people she talked to) to advance the narrative. And since much of her writing was never recorded, 
a number of actors — including Christine Lahti, Ashley Judd and Amandla Stenberg — take on her role. I’ve read some of her writing before but this is one of the first times I’ve heard her voice and she was an extremely passionate speaker, whether giving a speech at Cambridge or on the Phil Donahue show. And it also lets her own voice defend herself from misrepresentation of her ideas (at various times she was accused of hating men, of calling intercourse rape, and of advocating obscenity laws). My Name is Andrea is a fascinating tribute to Dworkin’s work.
The Zen Diary
Wri/Dir: Yuji Nakae
Based on the book “Tsuchi wo Kurau Hibi; Waga Shojin Juuni ka Getsu” by Mizukami Tsutomu
Tsutomu (Sawada Kenji) is a prize-winning Japanese novelist who lives alone in a remote farmhouse in the mountains. His wife died 13 years earlier but he still keeps her ashes. He’s under pressure by Machiko, his publisher (Matsu Takako ) to write another book, so he decides to record what happens each month over the course of a year (hence the title). Interestingly, while this includes big events in his life, it’s also about the minutiae of living. As a kid, he was a novice monk at a Buddhist monastery in Kyoto, where he was trained in cooking, cleaning, planting, harvesting and foraging for food. He brings those childhood memories into play as an elderly man who is also a vegetarian.
Everything he does is done by hand: from cleaning rice to finding edible roots in the garden. He digs up bamboo shoots in a forest and looks for mushrooms and fiddleheads on the hillside. Even seemingly inedible vegetables — like the first sprouts of certain tree leaves in the spring — are delicately picked, scrubbed clean, cut-up and cooked. He shines the wooden floor on his hands and knees. He also visits his elderly mother-in-law who lives 
in a tiny shack, and trades foods with far-off neighbours. But a surprise death — and the threat of his own mortality — makes him rethink his daily life. Should he settle things and prepare to die? Or forge ahead with new projects?
The Zen Diary is a subtle, low-key drama about life off the grid. It feels almost like a documentary, but the parts are actually all played by actors (Sawada Kenji has been a pop idol, composer, actor and celebrity for 60 years.) And the book it’s based on is real — it’s Mizukami Tsutomu’s last work (he died in 2004). There’s something deeply satisfying and 
inspiring about watching the foods being made from the dirt to the table — and some of the dishes he makes, like tofu made from sesame seeds and daikon with miso, look truly delicious. It’s also a bittersweet story about death and remembrance, family, kinship and relationships. The storyline is simple, and the film is extremely low-key, but it leaves you with something you didn’t have deep inside you before you saw this movie.
The Zen Diary is playing at the Japanese Canadian Culture Centre on June 17th, at the Toronto Japanese Film Festival; and My Name is Andrea played at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Daniel Garber talks with filmmaker Jake Wachtel about Karmalink
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
It’s the future in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Leng Heng is a teenaged boy who lives with his family in a poor section of town. He has strange dreams, centred on a small, seated buddha made of gold. He believes his dreams are evidence of his past lives.
Meanwhile, unscrupulous developers are trying to kick his family — and all his friends and neighbours — out of their homes and relocated far from the city. And his Grandma, who suffers from dementia and memory loss, is visited by a prestigious doctor testing a new sort of therapy. So he asks some of his friends — and a girl named Srey Leak — to help him find the golden Buddha. It’s a fun adventure, and they could all use the money. More than that it would prove his vivid dreams are real, and represent a 
link to the karma of his past incarnations. But he soon suspects there’s more powers at work here than just his dreams.
Karmalink is a new film out of Cambodia that looks at poverty, history, reincarnation and Buddhism, as well as neuroscience, memory, computer algorithms and virtual reality set against a futuristic Phnom Penh. It’s in Khmer, and stars first- time actors in realistic settings. Unusual, intriguing and a pleasure to watch — you’ve probably never seen any movie quite like it — Karmalink is Cambodia’s first science fiction film. It’s also the first feature by American filmmaker Jake Wachtel. Originally from the Silicon Valley, he is known for his short documentaries set in the Global South, and his work has been featured in the NY Times, NPR and Wired.
I spoke with Jake Wachtel in Los Angeles via ZOOM.
Karmalink opens in select theatres and on VOD on July 15th.
Red and Green. Films reviewed: Wild Mountain Thyme, Sing Me a Song
Hi, this is Danel Garber at the movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
This year – with it’s school-closings, rampant unemployment and a province-wide lockdown – surely won’t be remembered as a great Christmas. Especially not for movies. I can barely remember the last movie I saw in a theatre. But on the bright side, this means there’s lots more time watch them, at least at home.
This week, I’m talking about two new movies, a documentary and a comedy romance, that reflect the seasonal colours of red and green. There’s a lovesick Buddhist monk draped in maroon robes, and rural courtship on the emerald isle.
Wild Mountain Thyme
Wri/Dir: John Patrick Shanley
Once upon a time in county Mayo, Ireland, there were two farms. They belong to two families, the Muldoons and the Rileys, and the Rileys, to get in and out of their own farm must cross a strip of land belonging to the Muldoons, with an iron gate on it. So the two families are forever tied. Rosemary Muldoon (Emily Blunt) is a strong willed girl who loves riding horses. She is tall and elegant with long ginger hair and will dance a jig whenever shes happy. . Her father tells her you can do anything you want, you’re like the swan in the ballet Swan Lake. But where’s her handsome prince?
Across the hill lives Anthony Reilly (James Dornan). He’s clumsy, tongue-tied and shy. He likes smelling the wild flowers but gets nervous around girls. . He’s secretly in love with Rosemary but is too shy to tell her. Falsh forward a few decades, and nothing has changed. Anthony practices proposing to Rosemary 
by talking to a donkey, thus reinforcing the local lore that he’s more like a Kelly than a Riley, meaning hes stupid and prone to madness.
Finally, his father (Christopher Walken) has had enough. He invites his nephew Adam (John Hamm), a stock trader from Manhattan who drives a Rolls Royce, to come and see the farm… and their still-unmarried neighbour Rosemary. Is this her prince come to rescue her? Or should she keep waiting for Anthony to propose.
Wild Mountain Thyme is a comedy romance that just doesnt work. Its set — I imagine – in the 1990s or 2000s but seems frozen in time. No music except Swan Lake on a phonograph and celtic singalongs at the local pub. as if the radio and TV have yet to be invented and the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80… never happened. Would a headstrong woman really wait decades for a man who lives next door to propose? This was originally a Broadway play that won a Tony, but it 
clearly doesn’t translate well to the screen. The make up is weird, but so are the fake Irish accents and ridiculous plot. Even the art direction is awful — bright red shutters on a white-washed house, artificial looking CGI. Everything looks false and contrived. Emily Blunt is a good actress, but what the hell is this? Shanley wrote and directed the very good Doubt, and Dornan made his fame as a “sexual” movie star with the 50 Shades of Grey series, but this movie is a weirdly nostalgic American simulacrum of an Ireland that never existed. This movie is not entirely without merit; there is one good part – when Anthony reveals his totally unexpected secret fantasy (no spoiler), but its not enough to save this dud.
Sing me a Song
Dir: Thomas Balmès
Laya is a town built around a buddhist monastery in the remote, mountainous kingdom of Bhutan. Peyangki is a teenager studying there to become a lama, or a buddhist priest. This means lighting oil lamps, and memorizing sutras and mantras with the other novices. He tries hard, but is not a great student. But he owes it to his single mom (his father was frightened to death by a bear the day he was born) to pray for her when she dies. He earns some extra money foraging for wild mushrooms with his sister. But while he’s training there, the country is electrifying (joining the power grid) for the first time. This means sattelite dishes, TV, cel phones and social networks. All entirely new conceots in Bhutan. Soon, the former novices are glued to their cels playing video games instead of meditating.
He meets a woman on Snapchat named Ugyen, when he asks her to sing him a love song. He thinks she’s pretty and nice and has a good voice. But what he doesn’t know is she’s a hostess who works at a karaoke bar in the capital. And
that she’s divorced with a kid. And when they meet for the first time in person, both of them are very disappointed. Ugyen is the urban sophisticate, who is aware of the outside world and longs for the bounty money can buy. For Peyangki, even the capital is new to him, — he has no desire for money. But he soon adjusts to the thrills of arcades, fashions and virtual reality. Can this relationship work? Will Peyangki leave the monastery? And what about Ugyen’s goals and desires?
Sing me a Song is a fascinating documentary about the modernization of Bhutan as seen through the eyes of the two main characters. Its told as a narrative, with the audience following both of the characters. So we know their secrets, but they don’t… that’s revealed on camera. The director Balmès — he made the wonderful movie Babies — has a way of enteringthelives of his 
subjects. Its beautifully shot,often in darkness only lit by candlelight or the flashing glow of video screens. Some of the scenes seem planned or contrived, so you womder would this have happened the way it did without the camera there? And as a westerner — he’s a French film maker — is he also an influence on his subjects lives? — but you cant lie about the look and the faces and the feelings of the subjects. You really feel for them. This wonderful doc gives a rare inside look at the people in the remote kingdom of Bhutan.
Wild Mountain Thyme is now playing and Sing Me a Song starts on January 1st across North America; check your local listings.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com.
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